The invention relates to the management of the radio resources used in cellular mobile radio communication networks.
Cellular networks comprise base stations to serve the mobile stations located in the different cells. Each base station has a limited range, and is allocated only one part of the radio resources made available to the network operator. These resources are reused in other cells to optimise the communication capacity offered by the network. This reuse results in a risk of interference between distinct communications sharing the same resources.
Various radio resource management procedures can be applied, depending on the operator's choice, in the infrastructure of the cellular network in order to optimise the use of the frequencies and to minimise interference. The following may be cited:                power control procedures which limit the transmitted radio power when the propagation conditions between a base station and a mobile station are relatively good;        resource allocation procedures within each cell, which may follow various “tiering” strategies for limiting interference or allowing for greater reuse of certain channels;        automatic channel transfer procedures within the same cell (intra-cell handover), which change the channels allocated to communications undergoing interference;        automatic transfer procedures between cells when communication is in progress (inter-cell handover), which provide the continuity of communication when a mobile terminal moves and changes cell;        frequency-hopping procedures which provide frequency diversity of the interferers;        dynamic channel allocation procedures, by means of which the sets of frequencies employed in the cells can be adapted to the interference conditions or the traffic conditions observed; etc.        
A good number of these procedures call upon parameters which are compared to quantities measured by the base stations or the mobile stations in order to take decisions or determine a command.
For example, in the case of power control, the attenuation applied is an increasing function of the power level sensed on the radio link, a comparison parameter serving to characterise this increase and/or to set a power threshold below which no attenuation is imposed. In general, the inter-cell handover algorithms also use a power threshold below which they force a change of the attachment cell of the mobile station.
To optimise the whole arrangement, the network operator must, cell by cell, set suitable values for those management parameters, which raises a number of difficulties:                the number of applied procedures and cells, and hence the number of parameters to be set, can be high, which often leads to adopting default values which are not well-suited to the local characteristics of the network;        the choice of a parameter is not always intuitive, which also favours the adoption of default values;        an empirical choice, even by a highly experienced installer, may turn out to be poorly suited due to the complexity of the radio propagation mechanisms;        the relevance of the choice of a parameter is often highly sensitive to the choices made in the adjacent cells, or for other parameters of the same procedure or of different procedures;        when the radio environment is modified (addition, suppression, or breakdown of a base station or simply of a transceiver unit, ongoing change in the propagation conditions in the vicinity of a base station, etc.), the choice of parameters should be revised in the cell concerned, or even in a number of adjacent cells. In practice, this is generally not done due to the complexity of the task.        
An object of the present invention is to overcome at least some of the difficulties described heretofore. Another object is to simplify the choice of values for the radio resource management parameters used in the infrastructure of a cellular network. Another object is to render such a choice better adapted to the local characteristics of the cells.